7 Red Flags I Stubbornly Ignored About My Therapist—And Why I’m Still Paying the Price, Mercury Retrograde or Not
Added on January 21, 2026 inASTROLOGY CARDS
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Ever wonder what Mercury retrograde would have to say about sticking it out with a therapist who’s more hindrance than help? Because, let me tell you, my experience from 2007 to 2011 was a cosmic disaster of emotional misfires and missed chances. I spent four years in weekly to monthly therapy sessions with someone who, in hindsight, was just plain terrible for me—at the very moment my world was unraveling with my marriage ending and my father passing away simultaneously. Five years later, the only things that stuck from those sessions are the hurtful, traumatic flashes—and not a single pearl of wisdom. It’s a story that begs the question: how many of us endure these painful, disempowering encounters with the very people sworn to guide us through darkness? So, allow me to share the seven glaring red flags I completely ignored—perhaps so you won’t make the same cosmic misstep. LEARN MORE.
For four years, from 2007 to 2011, I saw a therapist mostly-weekly with some periods of monthly visits when she thought I was “doing better.” It became very clear to me in the months before my marriage ended and my father died (at the same time) that this woman was simply a bad therapist. At least for me. Looking back now, five years later, I remember nothing of value from our sessions, but I remember several hurtful and traumatic episodes.
At the time, I was struggling pretty hard and didn’t understand that what was happening was wrong. This got me thinking about how many other people might be having similarly painful, frustrating, and disempowering experiences with the people who are supposed to be helping them. So, today I’m sharing with you several of the times I should have left my terrible therapist — in the hope that you can learn from my mistakes.
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After becoming intimately familiar with my life story, which was full of me settling and putting others’ needs first, she condescendingly told me I needed to learn to compromise. The thing I needed to settle on? I was moving and, out of the blue, she suggested I may, for no apparent reason, need to live in the far-flung suburbs.
There was no reason this might be true. She literally just continued a lifelong pattern of people telling me that the reasonable things I’m trying to achieve were unreasonable for me. Now, your therapist may not always say stuff you like, and they may deliver some tough love, but if you find yourself in a situation where your therapist is forcefully expressing their opinion and it feels like they are actively rooting against you, those are big red flags. This happened in the first month or two of seeing this woman, and I was in such bad shape that I didn’t see the giant flashing warning sign there.
Researchers studying therapeutic alliance found that one of the most harmful things therapists do is show rigidity and fail to notice when they’re not responding to what clients actually need. When therapists miss or ignore these breakdowns, clients end up feeling disempowered and silenced, often leading to worse outcomes or quitting therapy altogether.
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During a particularly bad episode, I was struggling with leaving the house, traveling over to her office, you know, the usual. My therapist mentioned we could do sessions by phone if I needed to.
A day came when I just couldn’t leave the house, so I called her. I was greeted with a cold, stilted voice and treated to a lecture about how this really upset her day and was problematic for her billing. Now I’m willing to say that maybe I misunderstood something about the offer and screwed up, but the tactless handling of this situation always seemed kind of absurd to me. ”It seems there was a misunderstanding. If you want to do your session by phone, here’s how that works,” would have done the job without pushing her actively depressed client further down the spiral.
I think many of us live with the fear of accepting help, only to find that people get angry/resent us for doing so. I don’t expect my therapist to be a mind reader, but I do expect her to be aware of things like how hard it is to ask for such an accommodation when dealing with depression and to know how to handle things without exacerbating that issue. This is a big enough fear out in the world. You shouldn’t encounter it in your therapist’s office.
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I told her I wanted to work on the fact that I didn’t like myself and never had because that root issue was adversely affecting the rest of my life. She denied there was an issue and tried to explain away the effects rather than working on my self-hatred with statements. For example, when I said, “I’m not filling my classes because I can’t promote myself because I hate myself,” her response was, “Oh, well, you know the economy is bad. That’s probably what’s happening.”
This was about one year into my work with this therapist. After that session, I went to work and told my boss about it. She immediately advised me to dump my therapist. I did not. Partially, I think, because I hated myself, and partially because of depression and the way it makes everything so incredibly hard.
It was a big deal for me to work myself up to asking her to work with me on my self-hatred, so when she refused to do so, it was hugely disempowering. At the very moment I should have walked away, I felt the least equipped to do so. Long story short, if you go to your therapist and ask to work on an issue and they blow you off, get a new therapist.
Research on harmful therapy found that dismissing or minimizing what patients say is one of the main ways therapy goes wrong. When your emotional experiences get invalidated in therapy, it doesn’t just fail to help but can actually make your mental health worse by leaving you feeling like your struggles aren’t real or don’t matter.
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Upon hearing me talk about not wanting to sleep with my husband, she delivered a speech about the importance of doing things to please our partners. This advice was repeated several times with no real attempt to look at why I didn’t want to sleep with my partner.
I felt disempowered, unimportant, and like I was constantly failing. I remember thinking about The Stepford Wives a lot at the time because the whole thing made me feel like I had no power and my feelings didn’t matter. It was incredibly disturbing, frustrating, and, frankly, scary. Towards the end, I started having recurring rape dreams.
A big chunk of the reason I advise people with depression not to heed advice to “just do it” is this experience. The thought of other folks with depression being made to feel like I felt during this time is unbearable to me. Your therapist is there to help you function as best as you can for yourself, not to help you give other people what they want.
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I confessed the thought I had in the back of my head that I’d like to stop being a personal trainer one day and maybe become a writer. Her response was, “You know, you can’t just live off [name of my partner] for your whole life.” This one was bonus fun because I think I earned the majority of my household’s money that year (by a tiny margin, but still, in context, it matters).
This woman had a special gift for bringing my fears to life. I live in fear of being selfish and/or lazy — and with one sentence, she made me feel like I was both. Also, I was totally trapped in the life I had at that moment. No future for me. So, yeah, sometimes you’ll come out of therapy feeling awful. There are revelations and realizations and crying jags; it happens.
You should never come out feeling worse because of things your therapist has said that serve no purpose. Her words weren’t meant to move me forward or explore anything. They weren’t even based in truth. This was the moment it should have become clear that this woman was not on my team. It wasn’t, though. That came a little later.
Studies show that when your thoughts and feelings get dismissed or rejected, you absorb the message that your experiences don’t matter or are somehow wrong. This type of invalidation can actually contribute to depression and anxiety because it trains you to doubt your own perceptions.
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I realized the way my partner spoke to me routinely made me feel awful about myself — and my therapist responded by telling me I should look at what I was doing to motivate him to say those things. At this point, I actually asked her if my husband was secretly slipping her cash.
I was only kind of kidding when I asked that because I couldn’t find any other reason to explain why everything I talked to her about seemed to come back to taking care of him and not me. The pattern had become pronounced enough that I felt like there had to be an explanation. It was like my therapy had become about making me a more compliant partner. My own issues were not improving.
This may sound obvious, but just in case, if you feel like your therapy continually focuses on pleasing other people while you don’t progress at all, get a new therapist stat.
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I went in and told her I thought I didn’t want to be married anymore. She agreed with me that my relationship was deeply flawed, yet reminded me, “But you were just so determined to get married!” This gaslighting was especially brutal to take, as it’s a behavior I’m intimately familiar with. A key figure in my life does this out of fear of being blamed for things.
The result is usually incredibly, even if unintentionally, hurtful, as it usually involves blame being tossed at me in a time of crisis. The worst part is that there’s no need for anyone to be blamed. It’s just about needing support, and in the rush to make sure everyone knows it’s not their fault, some people, like my shrink, end up making the whole thing worse.
Now, admittedly, when I got married, I was looking for something to solve a bunch of crap in my life, and I thought that might do it. But two big things here:
I’m not assigning blame, but I do tremendously resent the way this whole situation went down. And that was the last time I saw this therapist.
In a study where people described their harmful therapy experiences, being blamed by their therapist came up as one of the most damaging things that happened to them. People reported that this blaming left them feeling disempowered and devalued, which is basically the opposite of what you’re supposed to get from therapy.
Shortly after this incident, I went to a friend’s house, got very drunk, and told them what I had been thinking about my marriage and what had been going on in therapy. To this day, I can still hear them say, “Well, I can’t tell you what to do about your marriage, but you definitely need to dump your therapist!”
And I did. My partner and I started marriage counseling with a person who turned out to be the best therapist I’ve ever had. She got me through my divorce, the death of my father, the year I spent sleeping with anyone I could get my hands on, launching my site, and leaving Boston. It’s been four years since I left Boston, and I still miss her.
My former therapist called me once after I stopped going. I remember her message saying something like, “The last time we met, you were considering making some big changes, and I was wondering if you had decided to go ahead with that.” I immediately thought, “Yeah, I did” — and pressed delete.
JoEllen Notte is a writer, speaker, researcher, and author. She has been featured in The Daily Dot, AlterNet, Powell’s Books Blog, and more.
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